Thursday, 27 February 2014

A Trans-Tasman Trifecta

I’ve been to New Zealand more than half a dozen times in the
last decade or so. I really love the place and the people. Apparently there’s a
North Island as well.

In the meantime, there’s so much in the Interesting Island.
January 2014 I was there again with my partner Trine for a few weeks, and did a trio of great kayak trips: Queen
Charlotte Sound, Abel Tasman National Park and Okarito Lagoon.

Queen Charlotte was a return trip. Back in 2011 I was there
with a few friends from the club and we had the unbelievable luck to encounter
a pod of orcas over a few days. It’s stunningly beautiful and as you head from
Picton towards the Cook Strait the environment becomes more marine and open to
the sea… as we found out.

Picton Harbour

We hired the boat and gear from Marlborough Adventure
Company, right by the beach in Picton. The boat was an eco-nizh, the standard
plastic hire double. They tried to kit us with a glass Sea Bear, but that’s
like an oil tanker so I passed on the
suggestion.

Not a Sea Bear. Me stylish as ever in my sex-tourist sandals and strip-club bouncer shades.

Trine and I intended to spend six days on the sound: first
day out past the ferries to Ratimera Bay,
accessible by motor boat and shared with a schoolboy rowing team. Paddling on
from there next morning to Blumine Island, which has been cleared of the
pernicious possums and stoats and is a
bird sanctuary – including the rare, transplanted and very endangered dwarf barking kiwi*,
which has a small native population down by Okarito ‘goon.

On the way we passed a seal
up a tree. Curious.

The Marlborough Tree Seal ( centre)

Ratimera Bay campsite.

Happy paddlers leaving Ratimera

The paddle to Blumine starts protected by the islands but
ends being a wee bit exposed to the open ocean.

Facing a strong nor’easter we decided to travel up the
southeastern lee of the island to stay sheltered.

down the southeast side of Blumine Island.

Great idea, until we rounded
a head and found we had to do a long flog straight down the gullet of the wind for about four or five kilometres until we
passed another head, and had to paddle halfway back down the island to the sole
camping spot. A long 25 km day.

Blumine camp site, looking towards the north

New year’s eve on the island, a double tot of run for the
crew and a spectacular sunset. Followed by pouring rain new year’s day, so we
decided to have a lay day and explore
the track that had been cut into the hillside of the island to a set of old WW2 bunkers which faced out to the Strait. The sound was a major
anchorage for the US pacific fleet in the day, and a juicy target for Japanese
subs.

Trine and a cup of tea on a rainy new year's morning

And those bloody wekas – obstreperous nosy fearless bloody
birds, they ran off with all my coffee and nicked anything not nailed down. In
the undergrowth there were nests sites festooned with gear and kayak bags.

Effing Wekas. Where's my bloody coffee you bugger?

Sunset over Blumine. OK, digitally enhanced. Pretty, but.

Second of January and we headed off to Cannibal Cove, the
furthest campsite out towards the strait.

North end of Blumine looking towards Cannibal and the Cooks Strait. Long Island on the right, Motuara left.

A lonely egret.

Delightful paddling, we called in at
the very strange monument to Cook at Ship
Cove – a mighty block of concrete with bizarre disproportionate trimmings and a pair of unrelated cannons. It’s
also the outermost place the water taxi can get to.

Cannibal Cove itself is about four or five k further on, in
a perfect bowl-shaped bay: an open campground backed by old conifers and dense
brush.

Beautiful Cannibal Cove. What a fine day! What weather and blue skies!

An alarming sign advised that possum baits (1080) had been laid and we
were spooked by whether the water was safe to drink – a touch of 1080 would be
a horrible way to spend the night. Turns out the catchment for the cove was
excluded, but that wasn’t flagged anywhere!

Needs no caption.

We watched beautiful red sunset and planned to paddle over
to Motuara Island, which has a terrific walk up
to a treetop platform with 360 views.

Next morning we were roused by a mighty howling and
hammering, and the tent flapping like a crazy thing. We crawled out to find
that a mighty wind had come up in the
dawn and was thrashing in straight off the sea. Williewaws were being raised a
half a dozen at a time on the water and great sheets of spray were being thrown
off the sea and carried into the treetops.

Williewaws by the dozen: twisting tornados of water dragged up by the wind.

Sheets of spray being driven hundreds of metres inland

And the wind was only getting
stronger, the rain bucketing and a high
tide was rolling in pushed by the nor'easter. There wasn't a big swell, fortunately, but the bulleting blast of the wind was phenomenal, the strongest I've ever experienced outside mountain blizzards.

Every one of those vertical smudges is a spinning thrashing williewaw. And they kept up for hours.

Now our little tent was not an alpine tent: it was a three-season
number, without the storm guys and
bracing of a mountain tent, and it was not faring too well. We climbed inside
and used our bodies to brace it against the
blast, holding on to the poles as it bucked. The sound of the wind in
the massive pines nearby was like a jet taxiing, far too loud to speak over. I
began to plan what we would do if the tent split and we had to stay here an
extra few days if the storm didn’t let up.

That didn’t seem like much of an option, so we physically
lifted the tent and carried the whole thing across a creek and into the
relative sheltered scrub , in the shadow of the big pines. I was concerned that we
might get hit by a limb, but the tent wouldn’t survive being out in the open.

The tent after relocation. Rising creek in foreground. You can see the big pines behind. The smashed limb foreground was from some other similar storm, not this one!

We had limited options to get out: if we couldn’t contact
the water taxi by 1400 and be at the wharf at Ship Cove by 1430 then we would
not get out, and they may not come the next day if the weather deteriorated as forecast. At about 1100 there seemed to be a lull in the wind, though
the rain was still belting down. We decided to make a run for it – if we made
it a few kilometres we could round the head and at least be in the lee of the
headland as we headed into Ship Cove. Trine managed to raise the adventure
company on the mobile – with signal intermittent – and after some infuriatingly
chatty laid-back response from the office we confirmed we would be waiting at the wharf.
Then a lightning pack of the boat,
lashing everything to the deck anticipating being hit by williewaws, full
storm gear on and we set out.

Around the point and towards Ship Cove

Our luck stayed: the wind held off as we were most exposed and
by the time it was rising again we were around the point and hugging the shore
back to the cove. After an hour or two more the storm eased and in the shelter
of the bay we unpacked all our gear and lugged the boat and bags to the wharf. When the taxi arrived the skipper told us it
had been a “perilous journey” to get out to the cove and kept repeating how we
had definitely done the right thing by bailing.

Roof racks.

On the way back in to Picton he
regaled us with stories of two and three metre waves he’d encountered heading
out, and he told us the wind in the sound had been clocked that morning at 80
knots (150km/h). The windspeeds made the TV news that night. Far and away the
strongest winds I’d ever encountered at sea level!

We had intended to head
down to Nelson lakes National Park to do three or four days walking in to Lake
St Angelus, but as the weather was reporting 70kt winds in the mountains,
snow down to 1700 m and poor visibility,
we chose not to take a walk along a narrow alpine ridge. Instead, we made a
few calls and ended up hiring another kayak to do two nights in the ..

Abel Tasman National Park

They say Nelson is the sunniest spot in NZ, and after our
storm-blasted time on the sound we wanted something a bit more benign.

Abel Tasman isn’t huge, but it is varied. It’s possibly
the most popular national park in the country: it has a spectacular but easy walking track, phenomenal beaches if
you like that sort of thing, and the biggest kayak industry I’ve ever come
across. Trine and I were again just
paddling a double independently, with a rather more slapdash hiring outfit that
the earlier one, but when we left the
beach there were quite literally too many kayaks on the water to count. As usual, if you head out to sea a bit you
leave the day trippers behind , so we made a course for an island a few km out
and soon we were alone.

Absurd number of kayakers off the beach.. more in background

It’s justifiably famous: the
limestone coastline is fractal with bays , inlets, small river mouths, all guarded by fantastic crenelated
headlands and rock outcrops. I’ll let the pix tell this story…

Lunch spot

waterfall in the back..

Mosquito Bay

Mosquito Bay at dawn

Filtered to within an inch of its life

But the best place, for mine, was Shag harbour, a small
inlet that opens up into a maze of channels and islands between wooded rocky
outcrops, with occasional glimpses of a channel back out to sea.

The labyrinth of Shag Harbour

And despite the
absolute peak season, the second night’s beach was shared with just one
other couple. Astounding.

High tourist season and one other tent.

Abel Tasman was an unplanned delight: but once back on dry
land we handed in our boat, had a shower under a tap in the boatyard and headed
for the west coast and remote…

Okarito Lagoon.

The lagoon, south of Hokitika and a bit north of Franz
Josef, is the largest unmodified
estuarine lagoon in NZ. Really. It’s famous for its bird life, including the white
heron or Kot. As it symmetrically happens, it’s also the home of the remaining
mainland population of the dwarf barking kiwi*, see Blumine island above.

There’s a small settlement that has a few bachs and that’s it, but it does have
a kayak rental business. Into our third
eco-nizh in a week.

Not going far

It’s very different to marine kayaking. The water is still,
with a bit of wind-fetch every now again: you wend through channels in the tall
speargrass, and every few km there is a river
mouth that leads up deep into a rainforest. In its own way, stunningly
beautiful.

The white thing is a Kot

White-winged black swans, or vice versa

For all their alleged scarcity those herons were everywhere.

Beware the danger in the trees

The lagoon gave us a gentle ending to the kayak legs of our trip. Three very different paddles, everything from howling storms in
off the open sea to serene drifting through rainforests with snowy alps as a
backdrop.

Needless to say there was more: mountain fun at Franz
Josef and Arthur's Pass, and the bittersweet return to Christchurch for the
first time since just after the quake. But that’s another story.